A petition to recall Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was certified Wednesday for signature gathering just as a second group of residents submitted their own recall petition against the increasingly embattled mayor.

The backers of the first petition will have 160 days to collect roughly 20,000 valid signatures of registered Oakland voters, giving them a deadline of May 14.

Gene Hazzard, a photographer for the Oakland Post who has been politically active in the black community submitted the first petition and is controlling the campaign. Hazzard did not return calls Wednesday.

Hazzard was seen by several Oakland residents as being too controlling, leading to the creation of the two other groups.

One of those groups is led Greg Harland, who ran for mayor against Quan last year, and whose group filed the second recall petition with Oakland's city clerk on Wednesday. Harland believes that his group's signature-gathering process will be done more carefully than Hazzard's and will be successful.

Harland said that his group had hired a campaign lawyer, James Sutton, and is in the process of hiring a well-regarded political consultant who had run campaigns in San Francisco.

"Recall campaigns are the most litigious campaigns of all," said Harland. "If this winds up in court, we want to make sure we're on solid ground."

The third group is the Committee to Recall Jean Quan and Restore Oakland, and has decided to circulate Hazzard's petition.

"Right now, there is one petition out there," said Charlie Pine, 66, a retired economic data analyst who is the spokesman for the committee. "Right now, if a voter sees a petition for recalling Mayor Quan, a voter can sign it."

Pine said it was unclear legally whether there could be two petitions circulating at the same time. Supervising Deputy City Attorney Mark Morodomi, who oversees election issues, did not respond to e-mails or phone calls Wednesday.

Late Wednesday Quan released a statement: "My energies are focused on jobs, public safety and education to move the city forward - doing my job as mayor."

did not respond to a call or e-mail late Wednesday, either.

Harland believes that it is legal to have two petitions circulating at the same time. He downplayed whether voters might be confused by two petitions.

"I think that that will be up to the media to sort it out, to clarify things for the public," said Harland. "It's really a statement about how angry the people are. There are people all over the place asking us for the petition."